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Government Demands for Data About Twitter Users Continue to Grow

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Government Demands for Data About Twitter Users Continue to Grow

By Vindu Goel February 6, 2014 11:48 amFebruary 6, 2014 11:48 am

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A chart from Twitter shows the increase in requests it received from government agencies for user information.Credit

As Twitter gets bigger, governments around the world are increasingly seeking information about its 241 million users and their accounts, the social networking company said Thursday as it released fourth semiannual transparency report.

The report provides a broad outline of the number and type of government requests for data, including breakouts on the 46 countries that have made such requests.

Over all, Twitter received 1,410 requests for account information in the six months ended Dec. 31, 2013, up 22 percent from the number of requests made in the previous six months, the company said. The United States accounted for 59 percent of the requests, far more than the second-place country, Japan, which made up 15 percent.

The company also received 365 requests to take down data, and 6,680 notices of reported copyright infringement under the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Such requests became a heated topic last year after the revelations by Edward J. Snowden indicated that the government was vacuuming up huge volumes of data about Internet and telephone users and requiring technology companies to turn over user information under legal orders so secret that they couldn’t be disclosed.

Twitter said the Justice Department’s rules about national security disclosures (which require companies to report data in vague ranges, among other restrictions) continue to be too onerous, so the company has chosen not to disclose anything at all about them:

For the disclosure of national security requests to be meaningful to our users, it must be within a range that provides sufficient precision to be meaningful. Allowing Twitter, or any other similarly situated company, to only disclose national security requests within an overly broad range seriously undermines the objective of transparency. In addition, we also want the freedom to disclose that we do not receive certain types of requests, if, in fact, we have not received any.

The company said it would continue to press the government to allow meaningful transparency and might even resort to legal action “to defend our First Amendment rights.”